Research conducted by the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) has found that IT teams across Europe are putting their IT infrastructures – and businesses – at risk by failing to profile application workloads and test data storage systems before purchase and deployment.
Mark Peters, the ESG’s Practice Director & Senior Analyst, said that assessing application workload profiles before acquiring storage solutions provides critical insight into what’s truly needed by application end-users.
Mr Peters said: ‘Without profiling production applications and analysing their I/O behaviour, properly evaluating and sizing storage systems can be extremely difficult as IT teams lack accurate information regarding the storage performance needed to keep them working optimally and to protect against slow-downs and outages.’
Of the 412 IT professionals surveyed, only 41% said that they will profile their workloads before buying their next storage system and 56% trust either storage vendors or their VARs to advise them on the right solution.
Solely depending on vendor recommendations or partners who are aligned with specific vendors could leave IT teams vulnerable, the ESG said. ‘Assuming that upgrading to flash-based storage will solve all data-related application performance issues is a myth,’ stated Mr Peters.
‘Application performance is heavily impacted by the I/O characteristics and patterns employed by the application itself and its interactions with other applications that might be sharing the same, invariably virtualised, infrastructure.’